Abstract This paper presents an object‐oriented software tool, called RTSIM, aimed at simulating real‐time embedded controllers. The tool consists of a collection of C++ libraries permitting a separate specification of the functional behaviour of the controller and of the hardware/software architecture to be used for its deployment. In particular, it is possible to provide an accurate modelling of the concurrent architecture of the control tasks and of the run‐time support offered by the operating system for the real‐time scheduling of the shared resources (CPU, memory buffers and network links). In this way, it is possible to compare different scheduling solutions by evaluating their simulated performance directly in the domain of the control application. Moreover, the tool can be utilized to tune up design parameters such as the activation frequencies of the tasks. The application of the tool is shown in a meaningful case study. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this paper, we describe an integrated environment to assist the development of hard real-time applications. It includes an interactive graphic interface which allows the user to describe the application requirements according to three hierarchical levels: the application level, the component level, and the object level. The development model we propose is based on an iterative process in which the real-time scheduling support is considered since the beginning of the design phases. Our graphic environment integrates several tools to analyse, test, and simulate the real-time application under development. In particular, the tools we have implemented are: a Design Tool, to describe the structure of the application, a Schedulability Analyser Tool (SAT), to verify off-line the feasibility of the schedule of a critical task set, a Scheduling Simulator, to test the average behaviour of the application, and a Maximum Execution Time (MET) estimator to bound the worst case duration of each task.

A distributed commit protocol suitable for multicomputer systems is described. A general programming environment which provides transactions as a programming tool is discussed. This environment is expected to be more dynamic than a database management system; in particular, it is not known how many and which processes will participate in a specific transaction. Therefore, a model of completely distributed transactions, without any hierarchical structure among the participant processes or any centralized locus of control, is proposed.>

The properties of a capability-based protection mechanism to be incorporated in a language for concurrent programming are presented. The protection mechanism is first abstractly characterized in terms of a protection model; the components of the protection mechanism, that is, the objects, subjects, and protection rules which govern the accessing to the objects by the subjects, are defined.

Abstract In this paper a unified set of linguistic features for providing a very flexible range of resource management strategies is presented. These features may be embedded in an object oriented programming language with abstract data type definitions. Firstly some of the more frequently used resource management strategies are illustrated and the related problems of resource allocation, access and synchronization are discussed. Then linguistic mechanisms to allow static and dynamic resource allocation, static access control and synchronization are presented. Finally some examples, reflecting a wide range of resource management strategies, are discussed in order to illustrate the application of the proposed linguistic features.